a slightly "gauche" "appreciation" of Bleach by Nirvana
Bleach: blonde, clean, chemical, corrosive, perfumed, next to the toilet bowl of childhood. Well my mum used to put it there anyway, not very clever in retrospect.
Nirvana’s Bleach is a seminal work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s too extreme and alienated/ing for that. But I think it’s the best album Nirvana made, and contains some of the most flesh rippling (anti) rock music ever recorded. Anti-rock as in anti-matter. Bleach is black, Bleach spits blood. From the gut-wobbling bass and mutual voice/guitar confusion/infusion of “Blew” to the thrashing plate-armour riffs and tortured trailer-trash adolescence of “Swap Meet”, the album is a multiple pile-up of unfathomable confusion, raw underdeveloped emotion and a poor, twisted humanism.
When I listen to this record I think of my raw underdeveloped emotion, my little past decade with which this record is subtly intertwined, but it is too strong, too full of Kurt’s (or Kurdt’s) personality for this to last. In the end, a sustained listen leaves me marvelling at how someone seemingly so fucked up could have produced something so honest and so lyrical and so violently, impossibly musical. Beneath the screech and skronk there is a fantastic dynamic at work, a hyper-speed turgidity that gives us a pure glimpse of Kurdt’s new-born bloody soul. The boiled down simplicity of “School”, chained to that pulverising jazz rhythm, is petrified, crushed by the authoritarian fist of demand, a scream against pressures that cannot be borne.
It’s true rebel rock, but this rebel rock is truly without a cause, without a core. In fact it’s another nail in rock’s coffin because the album has one foot in the necrophiliac heavy metal camp, using a broadly similar impentrable jackhammer riffage as any number of hopeless thrash/rap/death metal cases to drive the point home. The result to the non-converted is one of (once again) alienation, There is a loving, sensitive man behind the sociopathic facade of Kurdt’s noise finger, but what it shares with thrash/death metal (the non-corporate-cock-chugging kind) is an abhorrence of melody, an insistence that something is very very wrong, something that cannot be excorcised, and that this is the noise not of salvation, but of damnation.
But Bleach goes deep inside America beyond the skin deep of today’s tattooed and gurning theatrics. Kurdt’s talent, his musicality, twists heavy riffage into a rhythmic avant-garde, a new sound that is too twisted to live. The irony is that his 1 million meters deep self hatred, his teeny tiny self crushed by Uncle Sam made him (for this album) a true visionary of contortion, the much loved son of Kafka buggered by Black Sabbath, and (for Nevermind) a zombie genius of million-selling braindeath.
